Call centers often employ a number of agents for handling inbound and outbound communications. The nature and purpose of the communications may vary greatly. For example, outbound calling campaigns may involve originating calls to collect debts, solicit donations for a non-profit organization, or offer new products for sale. Agents assigned to these campaigns must be familiar with the appropriate debt collection practices, the non-profit organization for which donations are sought, or the products being offered for sale. These same agents may also be involved in handling inbound communications and may be required to answer questions associated with various products, customers seeking service, etc. Thus, in many instances, agents must be trained in a variety of areas, including: operating the call center computer workstations, interacting with customer information systems, product features, or the guidelines and policies associated with a telemarketing campaign. Thus, training of the agents is important since training typically increases their effectiveness.
With that said, even within a workday, call center agents may be required to handle a number of different topics and/or issues with respect to fielding communications. For example, a particular agent may be providing support services for a computer manufacturer. For any given day, the agent may be required to handle communications involving a number of different issues such as, for example, hard drive issues involving computers sold by the manufacturer and issues involving installing various software packages on the computers. Furthermore, different topics and/or issues may trend over time so that agents are required to handle a particular topic and/or issue over a period of time that they may not have previously had to handle as frequently. For instance, returning to the example, the agent providing support services for the computer manufacturer may see a large increase in fielding communications involving installing software packages on the computers sold by the manufacturer because a software provider may have recently released a new software product that is being purchased by a number of the computer manufacturer's customers. In this instance, the computer manufacturer and/or call center may find it beneficial to provide “refresher” training to the agent so that the agent will be adequately prepared to handle the increased volume of communications with respect to installing software packages on the computer manufacturer's computers. Thus, the knowledge requirements and subsequent training for agents may change over time.
Accordingly, a need in the art exists to enable call centers to better recognize changes in call center agents' training requirements and to provide the appropriate training based on these changing requirements. Further, a need in the art exists to enable call centers to automate such a process to recognize changes is call center agents' training requirements and to provide the appropriate training based on these changing requirements. It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure herein is presented.